At a Glance
Jean-Christophe Gaillard, Founder & CEO, Corix PartnersFocus Areas: Cybersecurity, Management, Leadership Thinkers360 In-Depth Profile & Portfolio: Jean-Christophe Gaillard Social Media: LinkedIn | Twitter Highlighted Content: The Cybersecurity Spiral of Failure (and How to Break Out of It), Going the Right Way about Cybersecurity Transformation, There Are Just Too Many Security Tools and Products Thinkers360 Leaderboards: Top Podcasts from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’23), The Year’s Most Popular Books from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’23), The Year’s Most Popular Articles from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’23) |
Thought Leader and Influencer Interview
Thinkers360 thought leader interviews profile prominent members of the Thinkers360 community who embody the power of ideas in their work. In this edition, we speak with Jean-Christophe Gaillard, Founder and CEO at Corix Partners.
As the driving force behind Corix Partners, Jean-Christophe has demonstrated visionary leadership, shaping the company into a reputable entity known for its innovative solutions and strategic insights. His passion for cybersecurity and his commitment to enhancing digital resilience have positioned him as a sought-after authority in the industry.
Gaillard is the author of and the host of The Cyber Security Transformation Podcast.
He is featured in Thinkers360’s annual Leaderboards Top Podcasts from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’23), The Year’s Most Popular Books from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’23), and The Year’s Most Popular Articles from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’23), among others.
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Thinkers360: Tell us a bit about your background and areas of expertise
JCG: I am French and British; I have been living and working in London in the UK since 1993, and I established Corix Partners over 10 years ago to help C-level executives with their cybersecurity strategy, organization, and governance challenges.
My background is in the financial services industry, where I spent over 15 years, first at Paribas (now BNP-Paribas), then at Rabobank where I was the Chief Security Officer for the International division up to 2009.
Since establishing Corix Partners, we have been working mostly with blue-chip firms across a wide range of industry sectors including travel, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing or technology.
Thinkers360: What are your current responsibilities and what’s a typical day look like?
JCG: Sometimes I wish there was a “typical day” …
I run Corix Partners, which is more a network of experts than a traditional consulting firm, so keeping the network and its various brands active (on social media and elsewhere) is an important part of what I do, besides client work and prospective work.
Remaining in contact with the coalface has always been important for me, so I am always involved with client work, even when other consultants in the network are delivering it.
Fundamentally, I believe cybersecurity is a cross-functional discipline, not just a technical one, and that organizations must work across corporate silos to achieve effective protection from cyber threats: Failure to do so often leaves massive gaps, which hackers keep exploiting week after week.
I have written in excess of 150 articles on the theme since starting in 2015, so maintaining and continuing this body of work is also a central part of what I do.
Those articles have been mostly published on the Corix Partners blog and via the Forbes Business Council, but they are also syndicated on a number of sites including Thinkers360, and our publication on Medium.
In 2020, we launched the Cybersecurity Transformation Podcast to discuss all this content and bring it to life under a different format, and finally earlier this year, a compilation of my articles was published on Amazon under the title “The Cybersecurity Leadership Handbook for the CISO and the CEO”.
I am also asked regularly to talk on podcasts or speak at events, so overall, keeping all those plates – and a few others – spinning more or less harmoniously is what I do most days.
Thinkers360: What’s the favorite part of your current role?
JCG: I am not a traditional “consultant” by trade: My background comes from the same side of the table as my clients, and my prime objective is always to help them, not to extract the maximum amount of business out of them.
Clients come to me with problems: Sometimes they haven’t had a CISO for 18 months; sometimes they never had a CISO at all; sometimes they have tens of people working on cyber projects but nobody who can paint the bigger picture beyond firefighting cyberattacks or putting ticks in compliance boxes. They look for real-life solutions and the honest experience that comes from having seen those challenges day-in day-out for over 20 years.
The core of what I like doing consists of putting things in perspective for C-level executives, helping them identify in simple terms where their key strengths and weaknesses are around cybersecurity, and where their priorities should be over the mid to long-term.
Besides that, I am also quite proud of the Security Transformation Research Foundation, a think-tank we established in 2017, with the view of challenging the dominant status quo across the cybersecurity industry.
It really embodies the work I have been doing since 2015 in building up a different narrative across the industry, looking away from the purely technical angles around cybersecurity, towards leadership, management, culture, and governance issues.
Thinkers360: How do you like to work with brands who wish to engage you as a thought leader?
JCG: The starting point has to be a commonality of interest and purpose.
I believe the cybersecurity maturity in many firms has been stagnating for too long because nobody really wants to look beyond the short-term, alleged low-hanging fruits, and boxes to tick on compliance reports.
That includes tech vendors, many of whom have been shamelessly pushing product after product, up to the point where large firms now operate, on average, in excess of 20 different security tools according to some reports, which is creating them countless operational problems – not to mention escalating costs.
I believe the solution lies in acknowledging the governance and cultural roadblocks that have prevented progress around cybersecurity in many firms over the past two decades and start thinking of cybersecurity as a structured practice embedded in the way the business works in terms of “process and people” first, not technology.
I am interested in working with brands that share my vision and, like me, want to break that spiral and help the cybersecurity industry and its clients move forward.
From that point onwards, I am open to all formats in terms of collaboration.
For example, I have been a non-executive director with UK scale-up Strata Security since 2019. Apart from the fact that I have known their founder for a long time, they are passionate about resolving the real-life efficiency problems of security operational teams, bloated by the proliferation of tools I was mentioning before, and that’s what clinched it for me.
Editor’s Note: See Jean-Christophe’s Thinkers360 In-Depth Profile & Portfolio to work with him directly.
Thinkers360: How do you utilize Thinkers360?
JCG: I have been using Thinkers360 since 2019. At the start, I was mainly intrigued by the ratings. Now. I am mostly using it to organize and structure all my activities, as it provides a fairly good taxonomy and data model.
As you can see by my earlier responses, my activities as a thought leader are quite diverse, and there is usually quite a lot going on, even within one week.
The discipline of entering each new activity (article, podcast episode, etc…) into the data model enables me to present everything in one place in a clear and concise way.
The badges are also very powerful ways to showcase authority in a simple visual manner, and I use them quite often in my own communication on social media and elsewhere.
Thinkers360: What’s your main advice for upcoming thought leaders?
JCG: It is a bit of a cliché but I would start by saying: Find your voice and don’t be afraid to express opinions as long as you can back them up with experience.
But don’t get stuck in the problem space: There are lots of people who can diagnose how bad things are, but not so many who can articulate meaningful ways to bring change. Real thought leadership, in my view, lives in the solution space.
And finally, give yourself time, be persistent, and be consistent: Authority in your field is not something you will build up and showcase overnight, and you will need discipline over time to establish it and maintain it. You need to be prepared for it and capable of tolerating it.
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